Given that you've an ELB focus on ranged; see the BoTh as a means of mopping up should you go into melee.

You could just go the same route I've taken, no enchantments, except maybe a smallish AMF. As was said a few times in my recent post about single tanks and enchantments a 100k AMF is pretty much enough to protect against decay.

Your skills - you're focusing on ranged so strike out bloodlust. Archery or evasion. I took evasion, simply because I was trying to replicate a UC tank with proper weapons. And after testing archery during the free retrain I find that I do just as well without it.

As a single tank he will need to be strong and fast. HP is less important - you're going for the quick kill.

Forgot to mention that I've got a 1 million plus ToA. I was thinking of keeping the evasion and wearing DB +65 and an AoI. That should increase my evasion to about 100, I hope. Then I will train my HP to 800k and put the rest into dexterity, strength, some AMF and protection to round up. Not too sure whether my bow can finish the job though I can hit for around 600k damage using ruins with a pair of BGs.

Its An Elven Long Bow [6x855] (+53). I'm thinking of increasing the + on the bow. Either I get it forged or I'll instant it with someone to +80. Hope that would help with hitting more often. I was thinking whether DM would be a better choice since I'm focussed on finishing in ranged. Less worries about huge AS, GA and other defensive enchantments.

Your bow has more PTH, but with the ToA PTh you should find that you hit doubles and triples anyway. My bow has an X of approx 1000. Coupled with just over a million ST and +10 Belegs I hit a damage range of between 300k - 1 mill. At the top end of that damage I don't need to hit each minion more than once anyway....

Spend some on the x of the bow and give yourself a decent amount of ST. Then spend time building up your dex. That's what I would do anyway......

I've always worked with the idea that strength does very little. For a tank the first bit is essential, protection against EC and the ability to actually do some damage.

But I've in the past cut my strength in half and not noticed much damage difference (ok, that was in CB1 but I don't see why it'd be any different here).
Since then I've done similar quite often and it's always worked quite well.

Obviously without strength you have no damage, but it does seem to lose its cost effectiveness after a certain point.

Funnily enough I've been doing the same with dex lately. I dropped 300k off my dex in the free retrain and saw no difference. A couple of people on my fightlist were suddenly a little harder to beat, because I wasn't hitting triples against them, just doubles. But when I shifted that 300k from dex to strength I was hitting that much harder, which made a hell of a lot of difference.

It's probably just me, but it really does give me the edge over other tanks at this level; but then I'm also using evasion, so I've got a lot of dex anyway that I'm just not acknowledging!

Ignore me Mr C. ;)

But I will say this: strength should not be underestimated in the pursuit of the perfect tank. My opinion yes, but I've fought as a UC dex heavy guy, as a slow bloodlust tank and as a speedy but very strong evasion tank. This one works far better than any I've done before...

Chuckles, STR is _very_ much more important here in CB2, at least at this point. It isn't weighted so heavily on the low end, and its portion to damage is every bit as important as weapon x. Jonathan has made lots of changes to STR over the course of STR, and I would say it is very important now to really hit hard.

But if you're talking single tank, they have to either be the fastest they can be, or the strongest. Sometimes a good balance of both is good too.

Just don't make a wimpy tank, because what is the point of that?

(Before anyone says it, UC tanks can be strong!)

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